The present invention relates to descriptions of audio-visual material.
Digital audiovisual material is becoming increasingly available to users through digital TV broadcast, digital video cameras, digital video discs, and personal computer based access to multimedia on the Internet or other network. In addition, persistent large-volume storage and non-linear access to audiovisual content is becoming available in consumer devices. Consequently, there is a need for rapid navigation and searching capabilities to enable users to efficiently discover and consume the contents of audiovisual material.
The extensive proliferation of audio-visual material available to users has the potential to overwhelm the consumer and lead to frustration at the inability to search and view content in an efficient manner. Viewing summaries of the content allows the consumer to skip irrelevant content and view the desired content quickly and easily. Further, multiple different summaries, if available, may provide the user with alternative views of a particular program that the user could choose from depending on personal preferences or usage conditions.
Limited summary selection capabilities are appearing more frequently in current technologies, such as the digital video disk (DVD). DVD movies normally provide “scene selections” or “chapter selections” that have a visual array of thumbnails and textual titles associated with each scene. This permits the user to click on the thumbnail of the desired scene, jump to that scene, and start playback. Playback typically continues until the end of the movie, unless the user makes another selection. While somewhat limited, these features provide the capability to index for the purpose of jumping to an arbitrary position and continue playback from that position.
Referring to FIG. 1, a system 10 may be used for the presentation of video, audio, or audiovisual information to a user. The information may be presented to the user using any suitable medium, such as for example, the Internet, a computer network, the radio, a personal computer, and a television. The user or the user's agent interacts with the system 10 to receive the information in a desirable manner and to define preferences as to what type of information is obtained. The term user is intended to refer to the recipient of the information, which may be for example, a person, a machine, or a software program operating on a machine.
To define these interactions, a set of description schemes containing data describing the content of the material may be used. User preferences 12 may be used in several different areas to maximize both the user's enjoyment and the system functionality. The preferences describing the topics and subject matter of interest to the user is used in both searching for and navigating the audiovisual programs 14. These two sets of data, the user preferences 12 and program descriptions 14, are correlated in the filtering and search engine 16 to identify the preferred programs.
The programs identified by the filtering and search engine 16 are then forwarded to a browsing module 18 along with the user's browsing preferences. Another output of the filtering and search engine 16 are preferred programs that the user has designated for storage. These are stored in the storage module 20. The programs selected by the user with the browsing module 18 are then sent to a display 22. The user may utilize multimedia title descriptions of preferred programs to navigate among the programs that the user wants to consume. Once a program is selected, a summary description of that particular program is correlated with user's browsing preferences to offer the user a preferred summary.
The display 22 receives the programs and displays them in accordance with the user's device preferences as to the operation of the display. User's device preferences may include, for example, device settings such as volume setting that may vary with the genre of the program that is being consumed. The display and user's interaction with the display, such as stopping a program before its end and consuming certain types of programs with certain device settings, also provides information in a manner analogous to a feedback loop to update and log the usage history 24. The usage history 24 may be mapped against the preferences by a mapping module 26. This information is then used in conjunction with user inputs by the user preference module 12.
These user preferences may be useful in many contexts, not just an audiovisual presentation system. User preferences and usage history may be transmitted to the provider of audiovisual programs 14 to receive selected programming or directly receive program segments that are preferred by the user. In the latter case, user preferences may be correlated with summary descriptions at the provider side to select and directly deliver summarized audiovisual programs to the user. The preferences may also be transferred to a “smart card” 28 or similar, portable storage and ultimately transferred to another system by the user.
However, it is noted that a framework for the description of the individual description schemes at the user, program, or device level are needed. As illustrated in FIG. 1, the audiovisual programs 14 includes descriptions of the programs in a description framework. The description framework can have several different types of descriptive structures, such as those described in MPEG-7, incorporated by reference herein. Referring to FIG. 2, one particular type of potential description scheme is related to searching. Searching includes information related to the content of the media, such as for example, actors, title, genre, etc. The searching description scheme, as described in MPEG-7, corresponds to a single video as a whole. A different searching description scheme is included for each video. Referring to the entire video is consistent with the desire of the user to quickly search the available videos for particular content related to the videos as a whole. Another type of description scheme is related to navigation. The navigation description scheme includes information related to navigating or otherwise selecting content for viewing, such as for example, table of contents, highlights, key frames, summaries, segments, etc. The navigation description scheme, as described in MPEG-7, corresponds to segments of the video. Referring to segments of the video is consistent with the desire of the user to navigate a particular video in a particular manner.